News

Major retailers including Marks & Spencer, Iceland, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and The Co-op have endorsed a new ‘chill to freeze’ innovation developed by Company Shop to tackle the UK’s food waste challenge.

The initiative will see surplus stock blast frozen and then sold as frozen product; an industry first in the redistribution sector. The process will help to address the long-standing challenge of how to redistribute stock  with limited shelf life, to prevent it ending up as waste.
 

Company Shop, the UK’s largest redistributor of surplus stock, has today released figures showing over 2.1 million units of plain packaged products will have been purchased by its customers by the time the company’s financial year ends on 30th September 2018.

 The news follows research published by the University of Edinburgh last week which reported that more than four million tonnes of good food is wasted in the UK each year due to cosmetic standards, in part because of customer expectations of how it should look.
 
Yet Company Shop’s figures are evidence that aesthetics are not everything. The commercial redistributor sells both branded and unbranded goods, and the latest numbers indicate an increasing willingness amongst customers to choose ‘unpretty’ products for the right reasons.

Company Shop, the UK’s largest redistributor of surplus food and household products, has released it’s first-ever Sustainability and Impact Report.  

‘Changing Mindsets’ demonstrates how the Group’s activity has made a sustainable impact on the food and household industry, headlined by the 70 million units of surplus stock it handled in 2018 which saved 23,607 tonnes of waste, an increase of 8% from the previous year.

·        70 million units handled in 2018 including 4.2 million non-food items
·        23,607 tonnes of waste saved; up 8% from 2017
·        380,000 worth of stock donations by industry partners to support Community Shop

For more information email sustainability@companyshopgroup.co.uk